RSS Feed Sign-Up

While writing that post below about President Obama's email supporting Jon Corzine.I found this great attack site called The Corzine Times. The site is well constructed and just like any good attack site has the latest anti-Corzine articles and news stories including economic statistics. The only thing that was missing was a link to Twitter.

Yes a link to Twitter. That's how I get a majority of my news these days. The site did have a link to a RSS feed which I thought - well how 2007. I can't remember the last time I added a new RSS feed and although not as long, I also can't remember when was the last time I looked at the feeds I'm receiving.

I think Twitter killed RSS feeds which is probably ok since hardly anyone knew what they were anyway and even less knew what it stood for.

So I starting blogging today after being on a vacation since my Dad died. To be perfectly honest I didn't really feel like writing anything. I had no ideas in my head and ignored reading a lot of my news feeds.

It gave me a chance to figure out why I've been writing this blog for the past few years. It definitely isn't due to the ton of traffic or the cup of coffee I generated every few days in advertising revenue. Anyway before I answer that question, I thought you'd like to see some numbers and what I think of them.

DATA OBSERVATIONS AND MARKETING TACTICS LEARNED FROM A BLOGGING VACATION

The number of RSS subscribers increased from 81 to 99 even though I made no new posts. This means that more people are using RSS feeds to get their news rather than email or cruising by websites. You need to stay focused on RSS as your outbound communication platform and not email.

My site visits averaged out to about 100 per day. While this is low for me, I didn't have any new posts. The vast majority of this traffic came from articles that I wrote that appear very high in search results. These include politics, online advertising, AT&T, and Ballistic Coins. Don't forget when you write your headlines that catchy titles may be creatively cool, but direct search engine friendly ones help you with traffic.

My number of Twitter followers has grown to 234. In fact I get one or two new subscribers everyday now. You can't run a blog now without cross posting and directing traffic to it via Twitter.

Understanding what people do on your site, where they come from, and what they click on are very important. For example, I found it interesting to know that someone decided to look to see when I mentioned Barack Obama in posts on my site.

Whatever happened to my del.icio.us link posts?

Does anyone use technorati any more?

Basically in the end I write this blog as what it was originally intended for. A web log of what's going on with me. I do get a kick out of when people come up to me at events and call me out as PardonMyFrench. It does help me demonstrate that I do know a lot more about online marketing than just online media buys and search marketing. People can easily find me on the internet and it helps me control my own spin and build Google Credibility. Seriously it is fun for me and is my voice. That's all it ever was and it feels like I can speak again.

When are financial services companies finally going to wake up and realize that one of the best tools they have to combating terrible phishers is secure RSS feeds. Take this recent phish email I received from a company posing as PayPal and you decide for yourself whether you would have fallen into this trap. I'll go through what tipped me off so you can learn from this. Please look, this is serious and is less about your PayPal account and more to do with getting your password. Most people use the same password for all of their accounts so now that these evil phishers have a password, they can try logging into your, say, Bank of America account or other checking account. How about getting enough information on you for identity theft? All from an email link.
Think about that.

Email address is phishy because it says service@paypal.com

Subject line says Please Restore Your Account Access even though I haven't tried to login in a while.

In the body of the email they request information from me which most companies never ask for.

They wrote that my account has limited access but never explained what that means

Case ID #'s look very odd

Finally and this WAS THE BIG TIP OFF - the links to logging in were not just links that took me to logging in but the embedded URL has my email address pre-populated in it plus other code. See the screen shot below. This is very, very evil.

I logged into my account, but not via the phishy email link, and behold, full access and no error message. I sent the email to PayPal who confirmed it was a phish.

Now, back to the start of this post. Why doesn't PayPal get it? Obviously by all of the fraud messages on their site, they know they are under attack. Why don't they just force EVERYONE TO OPT INTO A SECURE RSS FEED like the ones available from SimpleFeed? Besides having the unique format of RSS feeds that make them phish-proof (you opt in and they send you an URL to view content), SimpleFeed can also send it password protected too.

Every financial institution should provide secure RSS feeds for customer communications. Otherwise, sadly, they'll probably be forced by a governing body like the NASD to only send emails with no links in it - moving the financial services industry back to brochure ware. Come on people wake UP.

Been a while since we looked at RSS feeds and with all of the catalogs appearing in my mailbox daily thanks to my resident All Star Shopper I thought I would rant a little bit. First up, courtesy of AdRants, Target is offering personalized weekly ads via email which is great. Too bad, they didn't mimic what Sears is doing via SimpleFeed and offer the promotions via RSS feeds. Even Lillian Vernon has a RSS feed too. As someone that has held various e-marketing positions in big corporations, I wonder why the management team at Target couldn't make the leap of faith and incorporate RSS fields off their site for a nominal fee via SimpleFeed? It can't be because their e-marketing team was clueless can it?

Then this study came out from BizRate that examines online marketing in the retail space for the upcoming holiday season. Before you jump for joy over the next number, I was disappointed with the people that did the study or combined the results. It said that 41.6% of retailers will incorporate blogs or RSS feeds into their holiday marketing strategy and 79.5 will use viral marketing at social networking sites. Just to round it out, 97.4 will use search marketing. Ok, so retailers get search - wow, glad they figured that one out and almost 80% see social networking as an opportunity which I'm not really sure I know what that means. Are they going to upload videos into YouTube, put up a page in MySpace, or use display ads? However, what is disappointing, is that they combined the results between RSS feeds and Blogs which shows a naivete in what that means. Blogs are social communicating sites while RSS feeds are a mechanism for pushing out news and information. Sure you can advertise on both, but they require different strategies.

I'm glad to see that retail companies are embracing the internet for selling their products. Too bad, they haven't really figured out how to use RSS feeds to cheaply and easily eliminate catalogs for marketing their products. If only, they'd take a meeting with SimpleFeed and make the life of heavy shoppers (like my wife) easier.

I really didn't intend to right a second post today on RSS, but I'm fired up by a post from Tobi Elkin in Just an Online Minute called RSS versus Email. I noticed it in my email (yes I did write email) because the headline mirrored two posts I made a while back. The reason it was in my email and not on a RSS feed was because I was complacent and hadn't unsubscribed, but not any more. Why am I fired up? Well because of the interpretation of a study published by the Nielsen Norman Group called Email Newsletter Usability. The full study costs $398, but if you are like me you can read the 7 page executive summary for free.

The study as the name implies looks at email newsletter usability and does not focus on RSS versus email. There were three parts of the study and only the third looked at usability with an eyetracker study of RSS and email. In fact 6 out of the 7 pages of the summary focused on email. Hardly a study as mentioned in Just an Online Minute as "... the Nielsen Norman Group has a new report out on the
subject. The report examines RSS feeds from mainstream users’ point of
view." Want a couple of things left out from the Just an Online Minute Newsletter? How about these:

According to the report there were 93 users in the study and that 65% of their newsletters were for personal and 40% were for business use (some viewers counted them as both). Good and sound numbers for a study on newsletters, but for RSS what does the summary say? On page 6 you'll find this data point - ".....RSS. In our most recent study, 82% of users had no idea what this term referred to. Some users were familiar with the general idea of feeds, even if they
didn’t know the term “RSS.” ....This was typically because they were
receiving feeds on their My Yahoo! page or a similar personalized
portal." If I do my math correctly, 82% of 93 means that 76 people in the study didn't know what RSS means. More on that later.

In the Just an Online Minute summary there is a quote from the study that says "Newsletters are a much more powerful medium than RSS feeds, and I would
not be surprised if it turns out that companies make 10 times as much
money from each newsletter subscriber,” Nielsen says in a statement, but the JOM email omitted this line right before the quote that says "We don’t have data to calculate the relative business value of a newsletter subscriber compared to a feeds subscriber, but I would not be surprised....". That seems like a big caveat to me from a statistician.

As the study says, RSS is a cold medium in comparison with email newsletters which may be true for some, but written in the beginning of the study describing the third part of the research is this - ".....RSS readers to read news feeds. This lets us compare the newer medium of feeds with newsletters, which are now an established media form. When you describe something or someone as "cold" doesn't it normally mean you are not allowed or can't get to know them; perhaps someone or something that is not friendly or affectionate? Perhaps the cold description is because 82% don't know what RSS means and they compared it with an already established (and friendly) medium.

Why is that last point so significant? A while back when I originally wrote these posts, it was in response to an article from fellow MediaPost writer, Bill McCloskey, called The Trouble with RSS. As Bill wrote a while back in response to a reported 31% RSS penetration, "only 4 percent of that number are actually
accessing RSS in what I would consider the traditional way: downloading
an RSS reader and subscribing to news feeds." If you remember, I agreed with Bill that the penetration is really based on people using RSS in the traditional way and not fooled by newsfeeds in MyAOL. I think the same stringent criteria should also be applied to interpreting the current study.

Unless I found the wrong study or MediaPost has the full version which differs from the Executive Summary, I don't see why they would use the Email Newsletter Usability study for hammering RSS feeds. I included the link to the executive summary so you can read it yourself. Sure RSS is new and there are several changes needed to make it more friendly. I just don't think an Email Newsletter Usability study should be used to make judgments on a communications vehicle that is quickly evolving.This post is already long enough, sorry, and I'll continue it another day. Until then, let's just say that I don't think this study should be hailed as a conquering hero in the so called RSS versus email battle. There are definitely gray areas where they can co-exist and other areas like when you need a secure communication that RSS is a viable alternative. The study is what it says it is, a very thorough and well thought out Email Newsletter Study not an opening blow in a boxing match.

A little over a week back I wrote the Part 1 post of Marketing with RSS, Where to Start so I figured I owe you part 2. Part 2 is about where I would start using RSS for marketing on a website and the site I'll use as a guinea pig is www.schwab.com because, well why not? I think financial services companies are the perfect place for RSS feeds, especially secure RSS feeds like the ones pumped out by SimpleFeed. OK, where to start with Schwab?

STEP 1: INTERNAL USE BABY

The best sales people for using RSS are current employees because once you get them hooked, then they'll do a better job of making sure customers understand it. At online brokerage firms you get competitive announcements, hr announcements, new research and economic news, and everyone's favorite industry changes courtesy of the NASD or what we referred to them at Harridirect as the Pershing BIBs (don't ask me to translate what BIB stood for, but any former colleagues fill free to respond). Step 1 would be to get your compliance, research, and HR teams on board with RSS and eliminate these needless email box fillers. Plus, you'll get 100% delivery and won't have to listen to someone say - nope I never read that Pershing BIB on new billing notifications.

STEP 2: CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONS

As you can see from this screen shot, Schwab's corporate communications group has no RSS feed sign-ups which is a damn shame. How easy and progressive would
it be to add it in for PR announcements, Financial information and SEC filings, Presentations, and Job Posts? Once you get hooked on RSS feeds, it is really annoying when you visit sections of a website like these and find no feeds. OK, so I would make my corporate communications group very happy by adding feeds to this section of the website.

STEP 3: THE REST OF THE BORING STUFF ON THE BOTTOM MARGIN

Yes, you know what I'm talking about. The fun tabs that say Privacy and Security, Important Notices, and Business Continuity. Sure those tabs shouldn't have a lot of activity, but you might as well RSS 'em because the people that enroll in those types of feeds, really, really want them. What I would do is lump all of them together in a RSS group called Important News About Your Account so there is content in their more frequently; otherwise people will forget about them. And believe me after getting my head handed to me for not understanding these enough, you too would want them thrown together in a feed. After all, these sections typically make up your annual notifications.

Ok, that's it for this point. Oh stop moaning. Do you really want me to fill up your screen with a post?

Ok, so you are into using RSS but maybe the rest of your organization is a little less enthusiastic. Where do you start and how do you get going? Well, I had a meeting this week with one of my clients regarding using RSS for marketing, so I think I can offer some advice. First, let's take a look at the potential issues that the doubters in your organization may raise.

Lack of Critical Mass

While the number of RSS users is low <10%, the current users are often what I call the holy grail target for marketers - younger males with at least a college degree and money (reported by the IPSOS/Yahoo RSS 4Q'05 study). So, in order to overcome this issue (which shouldn't be an issue in the near future), here's what you should do:

Brag about the current user profile

Point out the list of available major sites that now offer RSS. I'd focus on your category - for finance check out MarketWatch.com, WSJ.com, The Street.com and if you are in retail - try eBay and Sears (yes Sears). Banking, well email me!

Browsers are the key. If you ever used Firefox or Safari then you know how easy it is to add in RSS feeds. In Firefox, I have a one click button into Bloglines. The new IE7 will include similar functionality. Once IE7 is released and pushed out to the average base, RSS sign-ups should increase.

The Average User Doesn't Know What RSS Is

Yes and that's true. How many of your Moms would click on an ugly XML link (my Mom might because she reads my site)? So, what do you do to market this.

Keep pushing the orange RSS logo (see right margin). I think people are starting to recognize the bright orange logo.

Name your RSS feed and don't call it RSS. Try COMPANYNAMENewsFeed

Place it in highly visible pages of your website so it gets exposure

And, include a link to what your news feed is all about - I like the process found over at Sears.com off the link from weekly specials button.

There is a Laundry List of RSS Readers

There are a ton of readers out there and I like to split them up between browsers, desktop applications, portals, and web platforms. Literally, you are faced with with the terrible drop down box, guessing the top readers of your client (see TheStreet.com's signup), or making the XML code available. Personally, I think the organization that the team at SimpleFeed uses is very elegant and organizes it properly. The one being used by Sears courtesy of SimpleFeed is my recommended organization of the RSS readers. Check it out here. Compare the SimpleFeed organization to the process found at the NY Times. Please don't think the average internet user will want to go through the "coded" RSS sign-up process.

That's it for today's RSS Marketing lesson. Next time, I'll go over my recommendations of where to start and guess what fans, it uses a financial services company as the guinea pig because I think using RSS in a financial services company is a perfect fit.

Ok, a quick one tonight with a few links on RSS. I've been researching this for a while now and it looks like I finally get to present a strategy on using RSS for marketing to a financial services company's client base. Even with the adoption rate being on the low side right now, using a company like SimpleFeed's secure RSS solution makes a ton of sense for banking and brokerage.

First study was released by Jupiter Research and it is titled RSS Comes of Age which looks at the spending of companies on RSS. The first key point in the study was that 63% of large companies plan to push out content by the end of 2006; up from the 29% recently reported. The study also found that 48% of current RSS publishers are spending at least $250K managing the content. So, you have to ask yourself why are you ignoring this channel? It is very easy to generate content and have it formatted for free over at Feedburner so it is just not headlines and text. Or, you could go to a company like SimpleFeed and customize while pushing it out in a secure fashion. Plus, SimpleFeed's tracking tool rival anything you might get from your email vendor (I know it sounds like I'm a shill for them, but so what?)

Pheedo released a quarterly Pheed report on RSS and it provides great information on advertising in RSS feeds as well as penetration. I've seen a few sites that are talking about the click rates of ads placed within feeds, but for me I'll take a pass for now. Not on advertising in RSS, but more on the data. I think right now any numbers that are being reported are more of a halo effect because it is so new. Witness the chart which shows the categories receiving the highest CTR - comics, travel, and kids. None of the feeds I'm receiving include them and you can be sure when I see the first few I'll click on them too.

What is very interesting is the number of people that read entire feeds via their feed reader (90%) which again means that you should be formatting it properly so it appears like a web page or an email. Bloglines still maintains the largest share of the feed readers coming in at 30%, but down from last quarter. Yahoo is next followed by Mozilla (firefox - pick it up today. Why are you still slogging away with Explorer?). The market is very fragmented so the best thing you can do is include enough versions to please as many people as possible.

RSS is coming fast to the average web user and once a critical mass of retailers embrace it, I think you'll see a tipping point. Try this out if my posts haven't convinced you yet. Go to bloglines and setup a free account. Then go over to ebay and type your favorite product search in and instead of looking via ebay, click on the RSS feed at the bottom of the page. Now, whenever something new is added to the auction, you'll get a news feed. If that doesn't convince you, send me an email or comment back below, and we'll talk.

About a week ago I wrote a post called RSS Feed v.s. Email - Just A Lightweight Bout Part 1, so I figured I'd follow-up this week with part 2. About 2 years ago or so (they all start to blend in together now), my COO and head legal council at Harrisdirect called me into his office. Mike was concerned about the new anti-spam laws and the requirements surrounding .ADV being in the subject line. Mike muttered at the end of the meeting "we'll have to figure out how to get around using email" because it will be nearly impossible to push it out due to phishing. Phishing? UGH. What the heck is that?

Phishing is a huge problem for financial services companies. All you need is some rat to grab a copy of your email, change the links, and redirect to a site where they grab your login information and then use it to say, withdraw money. And, because of phishing, every time there is a problem with your email delivery you end up scrambling to make sure you weren't phished. I actually had a way around communicating with customers by dropping a cookie on them when they logged into the site and then when my ad server BlueStreak saw them on our internet advertising buy, we would serve them retention banner ads instead of acquisition ads. Mike Hogan, our COO, gave me a look that told me "that's clever, but now go figure something else out."

FAST FORWARD TO A REAL LIFE PROBLEM

Well, we continued down the email path right until E*trade acquired us, so I'm not privy to their current plans. However, one of my financial services clients does not send out emails to a significant part of their client base because of phishing concerns. So, when they sent me the internal documents, I thought to myself, hmmm maybe there is something to this RSS thing. Plus, how do you take advantage of customers who want to communicate in this manner?

SIMPLY SIMPLEFEED

So, I started sniffing around and rummaged through very old blogs and techie documents and eventually stumbled across SimpleFeed which is a company started by Mark Carlson (relax Mark, I'm only referring to information found on your website!!). With SimpleFeed you can publish information your clients want and use a template to make them look like your website. Plus, you can make the transaction secure and authenticate it eliminating SPAM and Phishing. Plus, by using SimpleFeed you can track it just like it was an email. Looks like a great product to me. I love the fact that the product can make RSS feeds look like an email or your webpage; plus, the security features make it very attractive to financial services companies.

OK, SO YOU HAVE A TOOL, NOW WHAT?

What are the problems keeping marketers from using RSS? Well, a couple of things. First of all it is the low penetration which a lot of folks think will grow. So, what should you do? How about just implement it on a few pages where the information is updated frequently? In order to do that, you need to come up with a naming convention. Sure people recognize the RSS icon, but the majority of folks wouldn't even know to click on it. I'd suggest something like your company name:NewsFeeds or InfoFeeds or Feeds. So, if Harrisdirect was still in business, I'd put a link next to the RSS icon and call it Harrisdirect:InfoFeeds. When someone clicked on the link, I'd jump them to a page where they could check off the feeds they were interested in and then link them to a page where they would choose from a variety of popular RSS readers.

Next problem would be the look and feel of the feed and the security question. That's where SimpleFeed's platform would come into play. You could use one of their templates and create a great looking feed that would look like a webpage or even an email. Plus, you could even use the feed for cross-selling. Don't think you could handle it? How about checking out Lillian Vernon's RSS feed?

Do I think email will be replaced by RSS? Hardly, but it is complimentary. It is much easier to pound through a few hundred RSS feeds than a few hundred emails. However, I believe secure RSS feeds have a strong position in the marketplace especially in transactional businesses like financial services, online banking, and retail. And, with phishing concerns not going away, it looks like RSS could be the real deal.

The person that founded the Internet One Hundred Club, Bill McCloskey seems to be taking a lot of heat from a few posts he wrote a while back on claims folks have been making about the penetration of RSS feeds and their ability to replace email. I read Bill's original posts and while I was surprised by his wait and see approach, I did find his post very informative and included it as part of a project I was working on for a major financial services company.

For one thing, Bill was right when he talked about how people are reaching when they talk about the penetration of RSS and was also right to remind people regarding PointCast. Now, I don't believe RSS will replace email altogether, but I am working on a project to use Secure RSS feeds as a replacement for email to circumvent phishing concerns for this client who is NOT sending out email. I do think RSS will move website traffic because people can use RSS readers and not visit a site. That's how I pound through my feeds. Ok, before I lose you, here's what they are and why you should care about RSS.

WHAT IS RSS?

RSS stands for really simple syndication and was invented sometime ago by Netscape. In its simplest form, it is a news clipping service that provided a header and few lines of text. It has evolved however, to look, resemble, and act like email. Most major newsites (WSJ, NY Times, Yahoo, etc) allow you to tag a section and grab a RSS feed. That way instead of visiting the page you can grab a feed. For example, the RSS feeds on the right hand column of my site will allow you to get the RSS feeds of my recent posts and access them through your favorite reader (Yahoo, Google, Bloglines, etc). There are plenty of places to go to read more about RSS so, if you need help drop me a comment and I'll direct you.

In order to read a feed, you either need to have a web-based provider like MyYahoo or Bloglines, a desktop version that most-likely adds-on to Outlook, or use
Firefox, IE 7.0 which is in beta or Safari for MAC. No busy executive should be without one. A screen shot of my Bloglines feeds are shown on the right. Since yesterday, I added about 6 more.

WHAT IS THE PENETRATION OF RSS

As reported by Bill in his MediaPost article, Yahoo and Ipsos ran a study that was released in 4Q'05 that showed that 4% of internet users are aware of RSS and that another 27% use it but are unaware. Huh, you are probably asking yourself, what does that mean? Yes, true believers, a lot of your added content onto MyYahoo is coming from RSS feeds, but you don't know it. So, the number from that study is 4% not 31%. I can't talk more about what I think the penetration is now, but let's just say I think it is probably closer to 8%. If you would like a copy of the study, make a request in the comment section and include your email.

WHY DOES IT MATTER TO MARKETERS? - PUBLISHER SIDE

Simple, it is another form of communication that makes it very easy to push out information to clients. Plus, it is very simple to create and simple for someone to opt-in to receive it. Now, the feeds themselves are not personalized so you theoretically don't have the 1:1 communication power of email, but there is nothing simpler than signing up for a feed and then accessing the feed.

As you can see from the image above, I have a lot of feeds set up. They have not decreased my email usage, but what they have done is decreased my site visits. For example, I set one up for a few ebay products that I like to watch, so instead of going to ebay and searching for them, I just access the feeds. RSS is also great for getting breaking news and staying on top of your favorite sites in a matter a minutes. Again, in this case think of them as a news clipping service.

So, if you own a site, you should start thinking about providing RSS feeds of frequently updates pages. Perhaps, news, research, PR releases, job searches, and etc. That way people can grab them and read them very quickly. There are other uses for marketers, but that is for another post.

Next time I post about RSS, I'll review how Secure RSS feeds can be an effective tool for communicating with clients, especially as a tool to combat phishing and what I think it will take to increase RSS penetration. Remember, if you want a copy of the Ipsos/Yahoo RSS study, drop me your email in the comment section.

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